This discussion by a leading expert on drug use illuminates the factors that permit some people to use such highly addictive and dangerous substances as alcohol, marijuana, psychedelics, and opiates in a controlled fashion.

Understanding and Controlling Drug Users@@@Trafficking in Drug Users: Professional Exchange Networks in the Control of Deviance.@@@Substance Abuse, Habitual Behavior, and Self-Control.@@@Drug, Set, and Setting: The Basis for Controlled Intoxicant Use.

SUMMARY Background: It is already known from multiple studies that obesity is distributed along a socioeconomic gradient. In the present study, we attempt to determine the relative importance of three different status indicators: income, education, and occupational position. Method: Data were drawn from the 2003 Telephone Health Survey in Germany (n = 8318), which yielded representative information on the resident population in Germany aged 18 and older. The socioeconomic variables studied were the net equivalent household income, the highest level of general education completed, and the autonomy of occupational activity as measured on the HoffmeyerZlotnik scale. Age- and sex-specific prevalences of obesity were determined, and odds ratios with 95% confidence intervals were calculated by binary logistic regression. Results: In Germany in the year 2003, 17% of men and 20% of women aged 18 and older were obese. For men, both the highest level of general education completed and the individual’s occupational position were found to have a significant effect on the prevalence of obesity, after statistical controls for the influence of age and the other two status indicators. In women, a statistically significant social gradient was found for all three status indicators. For example, women in the lowest income group were three times as likely to be obese as women in the highest income group. Conclusion: The fight against obesity is a main goal of health-care policy because of its increasing prevalence and its contribution to the causation of many secondary diseases. The results reported here demonstrate that socioeconomic factors play an important role. These factors should be taken into account in the design of target-group-specific measures for the prevention and treatment of obesity.

Socioeconomic factors and obesity.

Hardly known twenty years ago, exclusion from public space has today become a standard tool of state intervention. Every year, tens of thousands of homeless individuals, drug addicts, teenagers, protesters and others are banned from parts of public space. The rise of exclusion measures is characteristic of two broader developments that have profoundly transformed public space in recent years: the privatisation of public space, and its increased control in the 'security society'. Despite the fundamental problems it raises, exclusion from public space has received hardly any attention from legal scholars. This book addresses this gap and comprehensively explores the implications that this new form of intervention has for the constitutional essentials of liberal democracy: the rule of law, fundamental rights, and democracy. To do so, it analyses legal developments in three liberal democracies that have been at the forefront of promoting exclusion measures: the United Kingdom, the United States, and Switzerland.

Exclusion from Public Space: A Comparative Constitutional Analysis

This article takes the concept of "community" as a sociolo- gical issue. This task is done revisiting the classical formu- lations of sociology (especially considering the conceptual polarity Gemeinschaft-Gesellschaft) as well as more con- temporary versions of it. "Community" was often conside- red dead, but it has been recently re-invented and re- activated by contemporary political rationalities. In turn, "society" (the greatest invention of sociology) apparently vanishes in the context of a process which has three diffe- rentiated but interconnected dimensions: the economiza- tion of the means of government of the State, the re- invention of community and the deployment of technolo- gies of an active self. Community has currently new featu- res, which were not present within those old communities of the past. But current "post-social" communities still are, even today, a privileged field for the construction of mea- ning and identity

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16 comentarios sobre la(s) sociología(s) y la(s) comunidad(es)

Despite increasing social inequality, hunger and nutritional poverty are not regarded as phenomena of German reality; Germany's debate on eating patterns is largely dominated by the issue of obesit...

Hunger and nutritional poverty in Germany: quantitative and qualitative empirical insights

Kreuzzug gegen Fette

Sanktionsverzicht statt Herrschaftsverlust: Vom Übergang in die Kontrollgesellschaft

Soziologie der Gesundheit

Spatestens seit der zweiten Halfte des 20. Jahrhunderts gilt die „Sucht“ als eines der grosen, international bedeutsamen sozialen Probleme moderner Gesellschaften. Kaum eine Diagnose ist in der Gegenwartsgesellschaft so verbreitet, und es gibt kaum eine menschliche Verhaltensweise, die nicht durch das Suffix „Sucht“ in ein problematisches Verhalten verwandelt werden konnte oder bereits verwandelt worden ist: Das Spektrum reicht dabei von den klassischen Alkoholund Drogensuchten uber die jungeren Phanomene der (substanzungebundenen) Fernseh-, Sex- oder Spielsucht bis hin zu der gegenwartig hoch aktuellen Fettsucht (Adipositas) — „suchtig“, so konne man daraus schliesen, ist heute fast jeder und jede. Dabei sind es genau diese Inflation und diese Selbstverstandlichkeit der Benutzung des Sucht-Begriffes, die dazu gefuhrt haben, dass Sucht und Suchtdiagnosen aus der Alltagssprache und aus der Alltagstheorie kaum mehr wegzudenken sind.

Henning Schmidt-Semisch

Papers

Kreuzzug gegen Fette

Sanktionsverzicht statt Herrschaftsverlust: Vom Übergang in die Kontrollgesellschaft

Soziologie der Gesundheit

Reflexive Suchtforschung: Perspektiven der sozialwissenschaftlichen Thematisierung von Drogenkonsum

Kriminalität als Risiko : Schadenmanagement zwischen Strafrecht und Versicherung